Unmappable Totality

Unmappable Totality is the formal designation, under Third Concordance, Annex 4, for any region of the Tower whose internal extent cannot be fixed by survey, whether because its boundaries are disputed, its depth is variable, or its geometry does not survive transcription onto a plan. The category was created in the aftermath of the Determination 44 survey disputes and has since been invoked in connection with an estimated four hundred and eleven holdings, of which ninety-three have been formally withdrawn, either because they were subsequently mapped after all or because they were found not to exist.

Unmappable Totality is not a description of ignorance. The Bureau of Structural Verification has maintained since its founding that an unmappable region is known to be unmappable, and that this constitutes a complete survey result. The distinction is frequently litigated.

Origin in the Determination 44 disputes

Prior to Determination 44, surveying practice distinguished only between mapped floors and floors pending mapping. The distinction collapsed in the winter of the long corridor survey, when two teams working the stairwell between the Liminal Scriptorium and the floor above it returned with plans of the same landing that could not be reconciled. The first showed a single gallery of eleven bays; the second showed nine bays and a vestibule. Neither team had entered a different door.

The Commissioner for Structural Integrity of the day ruled that the landing had not been mis-surveyed but had been surveyed twice and correctly, and that the defect lay in the assumption that a region must have one extent. Annex 4 was amended to admit a third category. The landing remains unmappable and is worked from both plans depending on the day. Visitors are asked not to count the bays.

Criteria and the problem of them

Annex 4 as amended sets out three conditions, any one of which suffices: a region whose boundary cannot be traced without remainder; a region whose floor count changes between surveys conducted more than a year apart; and a region whose schematic, when redrawn from its own record, does not resemble the original. The Department of Structural Integrity and the Department of Structural Verifications have disputed the third condition for the better part of a century, the one holding that it describes most of the Tower and the other that it describes a drafting fault and should be referred to the Guild of Structural Resonators.

The Bureau of Structural Integrity has ruled twice that a region may be unmappable and yet occupy a numbered floor, and once — in the matter of the eighth aperture of the eastern stack — that it may not. Practitioners generally cite whichever ruling suits the region in front of them. This is permitted, though not encouraged.

"A region shall be held unmappable where its plan, being completed, cannot be completed again."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, clause 4(c)

The Settled Summons and its consequences

The most cited difficulty arises from what is known as the Settled Summons, an instrument of the Fifth Librarian directing that no proceeding may be commenced in respect of a region until its extent is stated. Read strictly, this bars all proceedings concerning unmappable regions, since their extent is by definition unstated. The Emergent School argued from the 9th recension of On Conceptual Totality that the sum of all unmappable regions is itself a single extent and may be stated as such, citing the shorthand of the Administrative Caste as precedent for treating a totality as a unit.

The argument was accepted for six years and produced the Consolidated Boundary Return, a document of some eleven thousand pages that stated the extent of everything unmappable in one line and appended the working. The Return was withdrawn in the seventh year when it was observed that it had made the entire Tower a single region, and that the eastern stairwell had consequently been redesignated as its own vestibule.

Recording practice

Unmappable regions are entered in the register with the designation UT and a serial, not a floor number, a convention retained from the Return and never formally repealed. The register carries the serial, the survey date, and the phrase extent unstated, entered by the clerk and not abbreviated. The Department of Structural Verifications has twice proposed abbreviating it. Both proposals were refused without reasons, which is itself recorded.

Where a region abuts a mapped floor, the abutting face is surveyed normally and the region is entered twice: once as a boundary of the mapped floor, and once as UT. The duplication is intentional and is noted in the register as such, though the note has on occasion been taken for an error and corrected. Corrections of this kind are reversible for a period of one year and one day, after which the region stands as recorded.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal disagreement concerns whether Unmappable Totality is a property of regions or of records. The guilds generally hold the former: that certain parts of the Tower are, in themselves, without fixed extent, and that the survey merely reports this. The Bureau of Structural Verification holds the latter: that all regions have extents and that the unmappable ones are those whose records cannot be reconciled, a position that would in principle permit the category to be emptied by better copying.

Against the Bureau it is observed that the Liminal Scriptorium landing has now been recopied fourteen times by its most careful hands and remains unmappable, and that the fourteenth copy is held to be the most accurate. The Guild of Structural Resonators has declined to comment on eleven separate occasions. The question is treated as open under Structural Autonomy, which permits a floor to hold a position on its own extent that the Bureau need not share.

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A short inventory of regions currently entered as UT, as at the last register:

• UT/17 — the Liminal Scriptorium landing, entered twice
• UT/44 — the eighth aperture of the eastern stack, extent disputed
• UT/112 — the Consolidated Boundary Return, withdrawn, entry retained
• UT/306 — the eastern stairwell vestibule, redesignated, never re-surveyed

Entries are not removed. Withdrawn entries are struck through in the register and remain legible, on the principle that a region once unmappable is a fact about the archive even where it is no longer a fact about the Tower.